He eyed her. “Help with what? What, pray tell, do you think you’re throwing away, Daughter?”
“Trash,” she said. “And you are too.”
“There is no trash here. Everything in this house has a purpose.”
She picked up a broken vase. “Oh yeah? And what’s the purpose of this?” She jiggled it.
“As soon as I find the missing shards, I’m gluing it back together,” he said, completely straight-faced.
She let out a slow, patient breath and set the vase on the counter with a clink. “Dad? This house is seriously not okay. I understand this is difficult, but I need you to work with me. We’ve got three bags. These bags are going to get filled up and taken out. You can do this.”
He frowned. Then he turned to me. “What are your intentions with my daughter?”
“Dad! Focus!” Vanessa snapped.
I put my hands up. “I’m just here to help.”
He narrowed his eyes at me and Vanessa huffed. “Three bags. You do the upstairs,” she said, pushing the trash bag into his chest again.
Gerald gave me one last narrow-eyed look and set his mug down. Then he snatched the bag and wandered off up the staircase, muttering to himself.
Vanessa watched him go and then turned to me, blowing air through pursed lips. “So, you wanna see something?” She smiled.
I shrugged. “Sure.”
She led me back down the narrow hallway and opened a door. The room was full of bikes. Full. They were piled on top of one another in some sort of macabre bicycle graveyard. Mountain bikes with bent rims, fat-tire bikes with flats, rusted children’s bikes with the training wheels still on them.
“This was my room,” she said. “I used to sleep over there under the one with the tassels and the basket. Before the bikes,” she added.
She didn’t say it with any sort of regret in her tone. She was just showing me. Like she could separate what it was now versus what it used to be without it making her sad.
I think this was one of the most impressive things about her. Especially now that I saw the other side of it. She didn’t let anything get her down. She took things like a blow to a punching bag. She got knocked back, but then she was up again. So resilient.
I wasn’t like that. I couldn’t let things go.
I crossed my arms and leaned in the doorway. “Did Child Protective Services ever get involved?”
Vanessa shook her head, leaning her back on the door frame. “I mean, they were called. But the few times they came out, he’d pull off some eleventh-hour save, get the house livable again, and we’d get to stay. It was the only time I ever really saw him bust his ass.” She looked back at me. “Dad screwed up a lot of things, but he always managed to keep this family together. Family is the most important thing to him. Even if he has a weird way of showing it,” she mumbled.
I looked back into the room. I was getting nose blind to the smell of the house, thank God.
There were things of hers still on the walls, half covered by the rising mound of bikes. Evidence of an abandoned life. Pussycat Dolls posters, the mirror of a vanity with photos stuck to it, a blue first-place ribbon.
I wondered what it must have been like to grow up in a place like this. It couldn’t have been easy. Vanessa must have risen from the ashes like a phoenix.
“We should get started,” she said. She turned back for the kitchen and I followed her. She began tossing garbage on her way. “Just so you know, he’s going to fight me on every single thing. He’ll go through the bags, so make sure your trash is legit.”
“Legit trash. Got it.” I grabbed a crumpled chip bag and a greasy Chinese takeout container. “There’s some mail here,” I said, nodding at the end table. “Should we make a pile? Looks like these are for your sister.”
She was looking at a toaster with a frayed wire. “Yeah. Thanks.” She shoved it in her bag.
The toaster was concerning. This place was a huge fire hazard. Exits were blocked, the stove had crap all around it. I bet the smoke alarms didn’t work, and there was no way he’d ever find an extinguisher in this mess. This was dangerous. I didn’t like the thought of Grace being here. At all.
“Did Annabel live here with the baby?”
Vanessa shook her head. “No, never with the baby. She had some roommates at a house in Hopkins. When she started using again, they kicked her out and she stayed here for a few weeks. I have no idea where she slept. Her old room is full of car parts.”
I wandered the living room, leaving things so obviously garbage it made me cringe. I found more mail and added it to the pile. Then more. And more. It looked like he’d grab it from the mailbox and then set it down somewhere in the living room and forget it. “There’s a lot of mail here. You said you pay the bills, right?”
“Yeah. I get all the important stuff sent to my apartment.” She made a face at a plastic fish tank with a rotting tomato in it. She looked up at me over it. “I bet when you woke up this morning you couldn’t imagine how many times you’d be muttering ‘What the fuck?’ by ten a.m.”
I snorted.
She scanned the living room and sighed. “You know, I’m not usually humiliated this frequently in front of the same person. This is a new personal best for me.”
“You shouldn’t be embarrassed about this. It’s not your fault,” I said.
“Where’s the mail pile?” Vanessa asked, waving a white envelope. “I found another one.”
I nodded to the end table by the sofa and she walked to it. She stood over the stack I’d already begun and picked up the top letter. The corners of her lips fell. Then she tore it open and stood there reading it, her frown deepening.
“What is it?” I asked.
She shook her head and looked from the page to the pile of letters. “Oh my God…” she breathed. “It’s so much worse than I thought.”
I set my trash bag down. “What?” I cleared the space between us and took the paper from her hand.
It was a bill for Annabel for an emergency room visit.
I looked at the stack and picked up half of the envelopes and flipped through them. There had to be twenty, twenty-five different bills here. Clinics, urgent cares, hospitals.
Vanessa looked at me, her face white. “She was drug seeking. Faking injuries to get prescription meds.” She paused. “And she was doing it while she was pregnant.”
* * *
Vanessa was quiet the whole way home. When we pulled into the parking garage and I turned off the engine, she sat there a moment, staring straight through the windshield.
“Look,” I said. “There was only one clinic visit while she was pregnant. And we don’t know if she took the pills they prescribed her.”
She shook her head. “I don’t understand how a doctor could give a pregnant woman a narcotic.”
“Liability. Doctors can’t prove or disprove pain. If they deny her pain control, they can be sued.”
She took a deep breath and then pivoted to face me in the seat. “Do you want to go to Duluth today?”
I wrinkled my forehead. “What?”
“Duluth. You know, two hours up north? We could go see the Christmas lights at Bentleyville and do the lake walk.”